For 15 years in the inter-war period, the legendary couple formed by Sacha Guitry and Yvonne Printemps reigned unchallenged in Paris and throughout the world.
For 15 years in the inter-war period, the legendary couple formed by Sacha Guitry and Yvonne Printemps reigned unchallenged in Paris and throughout the world. Imagine a play that Sacha Guitry might have written in his lifetime, commissioning Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt to produce the script. The result, behind the witty words, is a love story full of happiness, quarrels, betrayals and jealousies – those of two sparkling and impossible lovers – about the passion of a genius for a nightingale who could not bear her cage.
“A few years of major passion, a few years of major suspicions, and a few years of major suffering.” Éric-Emmanuel SCHMITT
NOTE BY THE DIRECTOR, STEVE SUISSA
“You are old when you cease to love”
When I read Éric-Emmanuel Schmitt’s new production about this inredible story, I felt as though I was in a film from the roaring twenties.
Sacha Guitry remembers the love of his life, Yvonne Printemps: she, a backstreet girl, he, a great man of the stage. He recalls their encounter, their idyll, and how together they became the most dazzling couple of their age.
They go round the world, and everywhere, theatres announce “The Guitrys”.
On the boards of the Théâtre Rive Gauche, I’m going to direct this story like a waking dream.
While Sacha Guitry struggles to write a new play “at speed”, he talks to his producer about affairs of the heart….
And the instant he mentions Yvonne’s name, everything bursts into colour and delight. She appears on the stage, she sings, and at that point the audience decides to be her or to be him, and we’re whirled away in their romance.
In a series of settings, some real, others projected like a film, we traverse the era in cars, in songs, and in mythic moments that alternately make you laugh or cry.
The Guitrys will, I hope, make you want to love without moderation, and most of all, never to love without adoration.